What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

by Stephanie Foo

I’m tired of pulling. I don’t want to pull anymore. I want a dumbwaiter, or an escalator, or a floating rainbow drug cloud. Anything to lift me toward emotional stability. To fix me.

And it is not so much a medical document as it is a biography of my life: The difficulty regulating my emotions. The tendency to overshare and trust the wrong people. The dismal self-loathing. The trouble I have maintaining relationships. The unhealthy relationship with my abuser. The tendency to be aggressive but unable to tolerate aggression from others. It’s all true. It’s all me.

Every villain’s redemption arc begins with their origin story.

“I’m sorry,” I said, but she was already reaching into her drawer, so I stuck out my hand. She raised the plastic ruler above her head and brought it down on my open palm: thwack.

“Of course you didn’t realize. Because you don’t think, do you?

“I’m sorry about the Pictionary. And with the knife. I was just like…here, try it this way. I don’t think her mom felt bad. It didn’t seem like she was upset, but…” “Ooh.” My mother’s lips formed a very thin line, and her eyes narrowed. “You think you know better than I do? Now you’re talking back to me?”

People often ask me what it was like to grow up with this kind of abuse. Therapists, strangers, partners. Editors. You’re telling us the details of what happened to you, they’d write in the margins. But how did it feel? The question always feels absurd to me. How would I know how I felt? It was so many years ago. I was so young. But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably felt fucking bad.

I probably hated my mother for being impossible to please. But I also loved her, and so I guess I must have felt guilty, too, and frightened. I remember that I cried bitterly when I was beaten, and not because of the pain—I was used to that. I cried because of her words.

But what was I supposed to do with those feelings? Catalog them? Sit there thinking about them all day long? Tell them to my mommy and expect sympathy? Please. My feelings didn’t matter. They were pointless. If I felt all those soft, mushy feelings, if I really thought about how messed up it was that my mother threatened to kill me on a regular basis, could I wake up and eat breakfast with her every day? Could I sit on the couch at night and cuddle her to keep her warm? No.

My father worked for eight hours a day, then escaped to the golf course. When he was home, he was a half-present phantom, decaying in front of the television for as long as he could before being roused with the annoyance of familial obligation. Sometimes

Then the fights would escalate, a soap dish would get thrown across the room, horrific threats would be made, and someone would drive off. I’d sit in the garage, shivering in the dark, praying for them to come home.

“No,” I begged, but then I shut up because they didn’t like no. No was talking back; no was a word I had no right to.